Daily Prompt :-) Making and the Maker

Happy National Poetry Month! 

Spent this weekend making things with my hands, gifts for some of the children I’m blessed to have in my life[image error] I often tell my writing students, “Remember: you are now the maker. You have the magic of the maker.” Thinking on this a lot this weekend, on how the mystery of art emerges from our hands.

Making a Poem

by Paul B. Newman

You make a poem like a man

taking the measure of a sheet of copper;

first you cut it in the round

clipping the disc of dull soft metal,

then you take a hammer and pound

over all its surface on the small

iron hoof of the anvil,

forming a deepness within the curve

light within light reflecting

cool as the ripples in a well,

forming it on the resistance of the anvil

until it is so with texture, and with

usefulness a form and with delight a unity.



Make art about being a maker, about the act of making.

Blacksmith hammering red hot steel on a wooden surface that is catching on fire. Focus is on the hammer and glove.